FAIR's Rising Generation

Posts Tagged ‘why do bad things happen to good people’

Everyone reading this should know by now, if you’re outside and a mosquito bites you, do your best not to scratch the bite. Give it about three days, and you should be fine.

But if you scratch that bite, it will most assuredly grow. It will begin to bleed, and pus will start to ooze out the center. The infected wound will get bigger and bigger and scab up. Keep picking at the scab, and the wound will never have a chance to heal properly. What would’ve healed in days, will now take weeks. What never would’ve left a mark, will now leave an unsightly scar.

A younger friend asked me recently why God made his children forget everything they had once learned in the pre-mortal existence. “Wouldn’t this life be easier if we got to keep all that knowledge from before?”

But we haven’t done anything quite like this before! We didn’t know in the pre-mortal realm what it was like to have a physical body that could act and be acted upon. “It’s all about the experience,” I answered. Every action has a consequence, and now the stakes have been raised; we have more to gain but equally more to lose.

That should be straight-forward enough for most Latter-day Saints. Almost as easy for us is the whole, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Critics say ‘religion is a means of social control’ like it’s a bad thing, but if we all acknowledged and lived God’s law, we wouldn’t have things like war and poverty, and innocents would no longer suffer at the hands of others.

As you can plainly see, the Plan of Salvation has a few things to teach us that aren’t all sunshine and lollipops, and there are parts that I and many others continue to struggle with, such as the randomness of life and, furthermore, the randomness of its unexpected loss.

For example, sometimes things happen that are so beyond our control that there’s nobody to blame, not even ourselves. We struggle to find comfort through meaning, but no meaning can be found. Our only conclusion is that life is cruel because God is cruel.

The loss of a loved one can cut deep, and we subsequently pass through life with spiritual wounds that never heal. This is no confession, but an accusation: Love is a lie, we declare. God is a fantasy, and happiness is a luxury for the ignorant.

But wait! Does God not also experience loss? Imagine one of God’s wounded children. Rather than let the wound heal, the child stubbornly picks and scratches at it. “Here, let me show you what to do,” God offers, but it’s useless. The child keeps it up until the wound utterly consumes him; he dies from infection and blood loss. Whether the wound was manifested as anger, doubt, sadness, or despair, there was nothing God could do but watch.

For people who have loved and lost someone dear to them, this is my best answer to the question they are undoubtedly asking: We endure loss because God endures loss, and he wants us to be like him in every way. Although godhood may epitomize happiness, it’s also the most difficult job in the universe. I testify that God has earned our allegiance one hundred-fold for what has done and continues to do on our behalf.

The best we can do is allow ourselves to heal when we are wounded. We may feel so alone that nobody can possibly comfort us. However, the Atonement is not just an antidote for sin; it heals us when we experience a loss so overwhelming that part of us dies as a result.

We cannot understand the Plan of Salvation unless we understand the Atonement, and knowing every reason why God came to Earth and gave his life for us makes a huge difference to how we perceive our situation. As we traverse this lone and dreary world, we endure the unendurable through Christ. We will not run; we will not hide; we will not lose faith; and we will not abandon hope. Instead, we will stand behind our Savior, steadfast in the promise and reality of Eternal Life.